Orks never lose . . .

Hi,

I had to laugh the other day, when I was looking over some posts from this time last year.  There's a post covering a tournament I went to at the local GW, as a consequence of the Beloved kicking me out of the house on general principal (mostly for being over-stressed and grouchy).  As it turns out, this must be a seasonal thing, as I was once again booted yesterday to go and play with my toys, and got in a 3 round, 1700 point 40k Foodhammer tournament at the GW, with Da Boyz.

Now, bearing in mind the old adage that orks never lose, I ended up being thoroughly spanked; I was tabled in 2 games, and might as well have been in the third.  A lot of it was just lack of practise, some of it was the result of shock and awe (the local meta seems to be dominated by Knights, FW-style Lords of War, and various other flavours of degeneracy, which I've not played against before). That said, I did have fun - it was great to get the Boyz on the table, and get in some games (which have been sadly lacking since the summer), and it seems to have fired up the creative juices, as I've been scouring the intertubes for ideas on kitbashed / scratchbuilt counter-degeneracy since getting home last night.

Game 1 was against Jamie, who ran a list comprised of 3 Knights and 3 drop-pod marine squads.

He'd done a nice job on the knight - they were purty.

Deployment was fairly entertaining, with my mobs spread more or less across the table, vs three giant robot (his drop-pods were in reserve).

Ork deployment.

Post scout move.  I'd planned to clog up lanes on the Knights with deffcoptas.  Yeah, that was a mistake.

The game started to go wrong pretty much from the get-go.  In all 3 games, we were playing non-Malstrom objective missions, i.e., whoever held the objectives at the end of turn 5 scored the points for them.  This give a clear advantage to whichever player goes last.  I won the roll to choose whether to deploy, and move, first.  What I should have done is gone second, seen where he deployed, and then deployed concentrating fire on one knight.  Instead I went first, and flubbed it ;)

Fun pic, though.

Drop pods do their thing.

The game degenerated quickly, with me feeding units into the knights in a desperate bid to slow them down,  while staring in horror at the carnage they caused.

One round of shooting from one knight guts the Tankbustas.  Mad Doc's FnP didn't help against multiple S9 ordinance templates.  Ouch.

But, hey, the left flank's still holding.

Battle wagon delivery system delivers.

I took some small satisfaction in shellacking any marines I was able to catch ;)

As it turns out, however, numbers, klaws, and rokkits weren't enough, and my army slowly melted under the pressure of multiple ordinance templates and D-weapon shenanigans.

That knight is getting a little close.

Desperation sets in, as I begin to feed units to the knights in an effort to bog them down.

Not looking good.

Really not looking good.

Even the battlewagons succumbed, one rather spectacularly, when a knight picked it up and threw it at a nearby unit.

Discretion is the better part of getting killed anyway.

Marines vs. grots.  This'll work out.

*sigh*

Game 2 was against Stephen, who ran a Nurgle-based list with allied Knight, that rapidly turned into summon-spam

Once again, I goofed, opting to go first, and not gaining the advantage of reactive deployment ans the final turn.  What I should have done was stack the deck to shut down as much of his summoning capacity as possible, or at least, thinned out his herd of high T / Arm goofiness.  Instead . . .

The Fortress of Orky-tude.

The view across the table.

Another angle - that would be the second heavy walker.

Most of his starting line-up - not counting a few units of infiltrating Nurglings and some plaguebearers.

He quickly began summoning more demons, initially another Herald, and some pin horrors, I believe, but then it got nasty - he had a Bloodthirster and a Lord of Change on the table by about turn 3/4.

The "Chaos" knight, dubbed "Peek-a-boo".

The Fortress of Demontude.  Now with more demons.

Dueling template chuckers.   At this point, I'm controlling 3 of 5 objectives.

Each of us had a strong point, and I threw the Tankbustas, Binky, and the painboy out on a flank, in cover.

Most of my Deffcoptas came in fairly early, and I managed to line up four of them against his wall of toughness, but to limited effect.  Nurgle evidently gives cover save bonuses, which meant that even when I hit, his stuff was able to shrug off the fire.  I also poured a ton of fire into the nurglings, but again, with crazy cover saves, to little effect.

Part of the Deffcopta wave moves on behind Nurgle lines.

Sluggas duke it out with nurglings.  The latter survive with 1 W left.  I imagined it as a greased pig contest, just with more cholera.

Binky considers his options.

His summoned Bloodthirster made a beeline for Binky and the Tankbustas, who unloaded on it, but only manged a few dents - even with overwatch.

Better consider fast . . . 

The boyz in the tower are about to have a bad time.

Rokkit buggy fails to attract the attention of units several times it's points value.

I managed to stack up the "big boys" in the table centre, which prompted them to focus on the tower objective Da Boyz had taken from the nurglings.

Great Unclean one vs. the last of the boyz.

Two Soul Grinders and a Great Unclean One tore through the slugga boyz with predictable efficiency (although the boyz did me proud, and held them up for a turn), and the Bloodthirster turned it's D-weapon on Binky and the crew.  Binky came within a hair of glory, pulling the 'thirster down to one wound, but when all was said and done, the orks were gone, chaos had another objective, and the bloodthirster moved on.

Crunch time.

Bloodthirster pauses to consider the wisdom of charging grots.  Highlight of the day for me.

Penultimate, and most amusing moment of the game, came when a Soul Grinder, a Knight, and a Bloodthirster moved in on 10 grots and a slava, and paused to think about it.  The grots, being grots, had just survived a turn of firepower that had been ripping the guts out of ork units, and it tickled me to no end see three seriously bad ass models pause at the thought of losing combat to the most ridiculously combat-ineffective unit in the game ;)

Game 3 was against Jack (who I've played before here) who was running Khorne Demonkin built around a Lord of Skulls.  That particular abomination proved to be a little more than I could handle - though I did take off about half of it's Hull Points, it was just throwing out way too much stuff for me to manage (a couple of apocalypse templates each turn, plus some ordinance ones, and some kind of crazy D-weapon as well).  I was getting pretty tired at this point, and forgot to take pics (three games in one day is getting to be a little past my threshold for concentration), but there was one satisfying moment when I blew his Helldrake out of the sky with Deffcoptas ;)

That's evidently about 1100 points facing down my little battlewagon.

Behold, the power of the D.

What the day brought home for me was just how out of practise I am.  Maybe I'll need to get in more games with the Cub for training purposes.  Next semester looks a little less crazy, as well, so I may have a little more time to game.  It was, however, great fun, and seems to have revved me up a little - I got some stuff done for the tournament, and started a few other things as well, so fingers crossed I keep it up.

FMB